Welcome To The Village

[number_2]

Who: Everyone who was signed-up for the excursion
What: The Village December Excursion
When: Dec 1st - Dec 23rd
Where: The Village
Warnings: Involuntary capture and confinement including immobilization and restraints, violence, injury, maiming, possibility of death, torture, coercion, gaslighting, mind control, drugging, scientific experiments, and extremely inaccurate depictions of mental health facilities/hospitals, among other potentially triggering themes. Please mark all threads appropriately.




"Good morning, good morning, good morning!" A voice that sounds very similar to Friday's chirps over a loudspeaker outside your character's home. Yes, their home.

Overnight, all the passengers who signed up for this excursion have been transported to their very own personal cottages. They will awake in a bed that is familiar to them. While this home of theirs does not necessarily have to resemble the place they were born or raised, it will be a perfect replica of a place they truly thought of as their home, down to the most minute details.

The cottages are self-contained, the size of a large studio apartment so, in some cases, they may only resemble the bedroom and living room of a person's home with a shrunken-down kitchenette and bathroom adjoined. But the heirlooms of their past are here. A favorite doll? A treasured family portrait? Trinkets you have long forgotten about? All of them will be here, somehow. (All except for weapons, that is.) They are indistinguishable from the real item, down to the molecule.

After that wake-up call, the voice continues on to express that the weather will be warm and sunny, with no rain forecasted. A brass band concert is announced, to start at noon on the lawn next to the living chess set. And once that bit of news is wrapped up, lively marching band music will begin to play. And it will continue to play. All day. From every speaker...including the ones hidden in their home.

Welcome to Your Village

It only gets stranger from here. Characters may be dismayed to find that they are without any of their original clothes or belongings. They awake in conservative button-up pajamas. The closet in their home is full of the latest Village Fashion to choose from. Everything is The Village label brand, including the tin cans of food that stock the kitchen and any of the groceries you could get at the General Store.

Your ship phone rings. When you answer it, you will be greeted, once again, by the voice of Friday. "Your number, please? Of course, you have a number. Look at your badge." If they look down at their chest, they will discover a small round number badge has been pinned to their pajamas. Was that there before? It bears the symbol of a Penny-farthing Bicycle, with a number in the spokes. This is their number.

"No names here," the voice of Friday chides, "Only numbers. Number 2 would like a word with you at the Green Dome. He requests you come for breakfast. Thank you!" Before they can protest further, the line goes dead.


Some Notes:

No matter how many times your character tries to take off and disregard their number badge, they will always find it re-attached to their clothes again the moment they look away and look back.

Your characters still have their phones but now they can only make calls instead of sending texts. They also do not take or store photographs anymore.

If your character destroys or damages anything in their home, or in The Village it will instantly repair the way things used to on the Serena Eterna.

The noise from the speakers can be muffled by covering it with pillows or other creative items, but cannot be stopped entirely. (Sorry Phil)

Comments

[goodweather]

“Of course, Your Ladyship.”

He steps into the space to see all the years he’d missed between Cassandra as she was back then and as she is now. The furnishings, the weathering, it’s…

(… yes, he remembers. And that way is Cass’ room. And that armor is Johanna’s.)

His eyes land on the portrait on the wall.

[not_the_last]

From the portrait, the painted figures of Lord Frederick and Lady Johanna regard him with benevolent calm, surrounded by their seven children. Johanna is seated, with Frederick standing behind her chair, a Cassandra of maybe five or six years old on her lap, and the others arranged in gradations of age and height.

The present Cassandra steps back and gestures at the chairs and couch. "Would you care to sit? I can make us some tea, if you like; they've given me a little kitchen."

[goodweather]

“Hm? Oh. Right, uh, yes, if you please. Thank you.”

He takes a seat at the couch, feeling even more entirely inappropriately dressed, being in this small mimicry of Whitestone while wearing these stupid shirts. What he wouldn’t give for a waistcoat right now.

He’d start with something like I hope you’ve been well, but.

“I’d like to see this place for real some day,” he hums, looking around.

[not_the_last]

"I would so love to show it to you," she says, heartfelt. "There have been so many changes ... not just in the castle, in the city as well. Good changes, in the past year."

She takes a seat as she speaks, in a broad armchair, and tucks her feet under her.

[goodweather]

Ever prim. It's her habit, the way her parents taught her. Under the portrait of her family, he can't help but think of the way lives spill into another over and over--how can you say you're not immortal, someone had said to him once.

"Tell me about them. It'll make the tour easier when you do."

[not_the_last]

She follows his glance up to the portrait, and there's only a little pain in her smile as she looks back.

"A great deal of it's down to Percy," she tells him. "He's got such plans for inventions and devices to improve the city; he's already started a project to lay these great pipes under the main roads, and run steam through them in winter, to melt the snow above and keep ice from forming. And he wants to put up lamps so the streets will be well-lit at night. Not magic lights, he's very firm on that, he wants things that will keep working if anything goes wrong with magic."

[goodweather]

"Oh, hey! Those all sound pretty good. We never managed heated roads, but we did have steam pipe heating. I know one of Earth's major cities more or less runs on steam." Hi, New York.

If he can avoid Whitestone becoming a post-industrial city churning through tonnes of coal dumping smog into the atmosphere and drowning itself in yellow fog, though, that would be super great. "Lemme ask, though--what's your fuel source for all of this?"

[not_the_last]

Her face goes thoughtful. "That I can't recall, I'm afraid. All I'm sure of is that it isn't magic. Why do you ask?"

[goodweather]

"Ah, ehn--mostly because these technological developments sound a lot like something we on Earth did about two hundred years ago. And in a lot of ways it was good, but the fuel we used to power everything... I mean, we needed heat to create steam, and later electricity. So we burned up a lot of wood and coal.

"Now the thing about both of those... okay, there's a few things. First: smoke normally isn't that much of a problem if it can get into the open air, right? But when an entire city is burning tonnes of it at a time, that starts filling the entire atmosphere. There's a major industrial city on Earth called London. The heart of one of the biggest global empires. And they were burning so much fuel and churning out so much smoke that it would get clouded in yellow smog on the regular. That's a major health hazard for people, not to mention the environment that people are a part of and depend on. In one particularly bad case, the atmosphere trapped all of the smog in the city for a few days, and over ten thousand people died with a hundred thousand more injured in some capacity."

[not_the_last]

"I see," she says in a changed tone; not alarmed exactly but aware of a previously unsuspected danger. "Percy should know about this risk. I'll have to tell him."

Those words make a short silence around themselves, thick with implication, hanging in the air like smoke.

[goodweather]

If they weren’t in tacit agreement, he wouldn’t be talking about this in the first place.

“Right. The second thing is is that while these resources, wood and oil and coal and natural gas deposits and all of that… you know, these fuel sources? While there’s probably plenty of it beneath the ground in Exandria, the issue we’re having on Earth is entire nations across the globe are harvesting it all on… a pretty unfathomable scale, honestly. And it’s not renewable. But even one rig or mine, or a coal-burning factory is pretty destructive to the local environment. Nature, she’s tough, she’ll long outlive us, but the global corporations with all the power and incentive to keep doing it for more money, they’re the biggest drivers in, uh, a global ecological collapse that we’re kind of in the middle of. It still took about two hundred and fifty or so years to get there, but y’know.”

It’s a weird thing to have to be explaining the cost of the Industrial Revolution from the ground up.

[not_the_last]

It's a near-overwhelming relief when he doesn't say anything about it. You know that we're not going home, he told her once, and it hurt abominably; whether he's changed his mind to think they might after all go home, or has a more complicated belief than that, or has just chosen not to bring it up now, she's grateful for it.

"Well. That's ... troubling," she says slowly, in considerable understatement.

[goodweather]

Phil just laughs. "More than. Again, these are the results of like--two hundred and fifty years of, uh, unimaginable amounts of mining and burning and industrial development that advances technology, resource usage, corporations, and the world population at, uh, a truly exponential rate? Like..." He loosely gestures the line graph of the global population over the course of the last two thousand years.

"So Exandria is pretty safe from this, unless magic comes along to... I don't know, do something. I'm just trying to let the lot of you get ahead of the curve, because we didn't formally figure this stuff about until about fifty, eighty years ago. And it's pretty hard to get things to change when all the global powers are running on oil and coal with no cheaper or more reliable alternative.

"... I can explain the whole 'ecological collapse' part but I understand that might be a bit much for today." He looks pretty sheepish.

[not_the_last]

"I don't know if the translation is right, but it sounds ... a little like what happened during the Calamity, when the Age of Arcanum ended." She frowns, partly due to the grimness of the subject, partly to a struggle to remember distant history. "The entire shape of the world was disrupted. Living things that had depended on the old way either changed drastically, or died out. And then the creatures that had lived on them had to do the same, and so on."